Tag Archives: finland

Hey all, I just wanted share some personal feelings I’ve been having lately, as I realize that I never really talk about my own life or what is happening with me.

Leaving my day job

Last year I worked fulltime at Applifier, working on their mobile game video sharing service, Everyplay, that allows game developers to integrate a video recording service into their existing games and gain new users through people showing of their gameplay to others via video recordings. There I worked on the iOS native side of things, mostly focusing on the base SDK library, UI & Video Player programming.

Everyplay – Share your Game Replays

I learned a lot of things during this year, worked with an excellent and very skilled team, who taught me new things almost everyday .The work pace there was pretty hectic, with deadlines constantly reminding that there was no time to really perfect all the code, just to get things shipped and moving forwards. This was fun in a way, but really stressful also as I had to get up everyday and to go the office, something that is not very easy for me, as I have problem adapting to a normal sleep rhythm at times, and have energy flowing through the nights when normal people are sleeping.

This constant pressure of having to be at the office everyday eventually led me to a stressful state of not enjoying what I was doing enough that it was worth it. Although I learned to develop methods that allowed me to stay stress free, like taking a morning swim at the local swimming hall, or doing my morning meditation and yoga in order to find strength to keep doing it, the energy that went into me doing something I had to force myself to do just wasn’t worth it.

Ultimately, I decided to take a leap into the unknown again and leave this job I was making good money at and that I could have continued working at if I just had endured this feeling of going against the flow. But this is not something I want to do, I want to do something that I Love in Life.

The full day to day job left me little time and energy to focus on what I actually loved doing, that is, creating Art and focusing on developing GeoKone.NET. Now I have all the time, but a lot of other stuff started changing quickly after I left my day job.

Personal Demons

During these last 2-3 months I have been really having to gaze deep into my inner feelings and ways I have been behaving towards myself and those who love me in my life. I have always been really sensitive to other people and energies around me, and I have built this wall around me that prevents anyone from really seeing who I am. Somehow it feels this wall has started to break now, and it has lead to me staring face to face with my most deepest traumas and inner demons.

Through this process I have realized that I have caused a lot of pain in the life of those who have just wanted to love me, and this has been really difficult, like I have been teared apart and forced to gaze at all the mistakes I have made and to shed light on them. In a sense, the whole year of 2012 was some kind of personal breakdown year for me. End of the world, so to speak, at least on some level. The me who was before is no more. There is only a wreckage of emotions, waiting to be picked up again and again re-build myself, like I have done numerous times in the past.

Deep depression has also been taking it’s toll on me, feeling nothing but wanting to end it all, but I have enough experience working with depression that I realize what this feeling is doing there, it is something for me to sink deeply into and allow me to let go of the pain that I have been gathering, the emotions I have not said out loud, the feelings that I have kept inside me have created this state of burdening.

I must just endure this and I will rise again. There is nothing that can stop me from fulfilling my mission here, but seems like I have chosen to create this illusion of pain and sorrow that I must go through alone in order to learn something. I just wish I knew what that something is that is preventing me from just enjoying happiness, but it seems like it’s buried deep within me, so deep that I cannot see what it is.

The Light Breaks Through

But I have hope, and I am sure that the things I am putting my focus in are worth working for. I will finish GeoKone.NET to it’s 1.0 version and then see what happens. It is suprisingly hard to focus on a single task, by my own. Rising up everyday, finding the motivation to sit in front of the computer, finding the motivation to do my morning yoga, go swimming, see some friends now and then and not just lay down all day and let the situation get over me.

This gets every year really hard when the sun goes down and there is only darkness and coldness outside. But I have endured this for 30 years already, so I know one more year won’t kill me. Many times I have wondered why would anyone live here in Finland, where the winters are long, dark and cold, and many times I have realized that this is a great place to live, as the harsh conditions and the perfect summers tend to create certain kind of thinking and a mentality of surviving through the winters that is very respectable.

People here cannot really build things that don’t last, because that would be fatal when the temperature drops below 20 degrees celsius, it’s windy, there might be one hour of light during the day. The people who have survived here are really going through this struggle every year, even though modern day technology helps a lot, but it’s still a mental battle anyway.

Surviving through the winter always feels like a victory here, I survived one more year. I intend to continue celebrating many more victories over winter and continue seeking to do the things I Love in Life.